What do you call three periods in a row? Take your time, we’ll wait . . .
Those three little dots are called an ellipsis (plural: ellipses). The term ellipsis comes from the Greek word meaning “omission,” and that’s just what an ellipsis does—it shows that something has been left out. When you’re quoting someone, you can use an ellipsis to show that you’ve omitted some of their words.
Apostrophes can be tricky. Sometimes they form possessives. Sometimes they form contractions. Can they ever make something plural?
A contraction is a shortened form of a word (or group of words) that omits certain letters or sounds. In a contraction, an apostrophe represents missing letters. The most common contractions are made up of verbs, auxiliaries, or modals attached to other words: He would=He’d.
If you stare awhile at the string of characters that a sentence comprises, the squiggles lose all meaning. That humans somehow manage to agree on the use of these symbols well enough to communicate at all can seem miraculous.
But what about when we don’t quite agree—when it seems a writer has added a superfluous, bafflingly out-of-place comma, perhaps, or inexplicably used the wrong pronoun?
Any writer who’s spent time in the trenches publishing articles online knows it’s hard to keep a reader’s attention. In fact, according to Tony Haile’s 2014 article on Time.com, 55 percent of readers will spend fifteen seconds or less actively on a page reading the article that took you many times longer to write and carefully proofread. Like it or not, our online culture, which blasts us with a never-ending stream of content 24/7, has made us skimmers rather than deep readers.
Some words have multiple correct spellings. You probably already know this is true for certain verbs (e.g., spell vs. spelt) and several nouns (e.g., color, favor, neighbor); prepositions aren’t immune to it either.
A flyer, a circular, a leaflet, a pamphlet, a handbill—so many words for one simple thing. A piece of paper with words and images printed on it that gets handed out on a street.
How the Grammar Girl Team Answers All Those Grammar Questions
Guest post by Ashley Dodge
English is a complex, complicated, and often confusing language. It seems as if everyone, at one time or another, needs help with grammar. As Grammar Girl’s assistant, I’m lucky enough to help people find the answers to their grammar questions sent in by e-mail, whether it’s how to remember “affect” or “effect,” or how to use the semicolon.
Language is constantly evolving – a fact made especially clear when we take a look at historical documents and note how writing norms have shifted over the years. The further back we go, the bigger the shift. The Declaration of Independence, for example, represents a version of English that is noticeably different than that which we use to communicate today.
What are the main grammatical differences between Thomas Jefferson’s version of English and our own?
People are often surprised to learn that alright is not an accepted spelling of all right. Although the one-word spelling of alright is seen in informal writing, teachers and editors will always consider it incorrect. To use the expression with impunity, it is best to spell it as two words: all right.
It’s possible that you stared at your paper in wonder the first time your English teacher marked alright as an incorrect spelling.
